Nada - Interview 20

Age at interview: 26

Age at diagnosis: 22

Brief Outline:

Nada had her first 'breakdown' in her first year of university. During her finals she became depressed (after a relationship breakdown), thought that horrible events were going to happen, and eventually was taken to hospital. Since then, she has had another admission to hospital, but is now doing voluntary work, enjoys music and going out dancing.

Background:

Nada does voluntary work, is single and has no children. Ethnic background' British Indian

More about me...

Nada describes herself as always having been ‘very emotional’ and had memories of feeling ‘pretty down’ from a young age. In her home environment she never felt very safe or secure, and her parents fought constantly and used to spend a lot of time away from home. Her mum suffered with depression and asthma. She spent a lot of time in other people’s homes. She was very close to her brother, who was older, but missed him when he went off to Uni. She developed eating disorders and started dropping out of extracurricular activities, as well as smoking weed. She began a very intense relationship with a boy in her late teens and started to change ‘quite drastically’. She lost her friends and became paranoid. She stayed with this partner for four and a half years even after the first ‘breakdown’ at university.

 

Nada went to a university far away from home. She tried to have fun but thinks it was ‘masking a deep, deep, sadness’. She got a job as well as studying three subjects and was ‘exhausted’. She said that she was very ‘hypersensitive’ and remembers during her first breakdown getting very ‘thin’ and ‘withdrawn’ and experiencing long periods of insomnia. She went to the GP and was given medication to sleep which didn’t really work, and felt very stressed by exams at this point. However this summer she went away which ‘really helped’ even though she wasn’t very well initially. In her second year she started experimenting with pills (ecstasy) and acid, and was ‘loving it’ as it was ‘extreme escapism’ and just doing the ‘minimum’ at university. She started to put on weight and became more self-conscious. She also got into drama, and sometimes turned up to rehearsals not ‘compos mentis’, but also found it an incentive to remain sober. Although she was eating more healthily she was still doing drugs and found things a ‘bit of a haze’. She felt farther and farther from her partner, who went on a year abroad, and she developed feelings for another person. Finally she ended the 4½ year relationship and then went on a ‘total bender’.

 

In her final year at university Nada had a trip (acid) with someone and ‘never properly managed to leave it’. Drugs started to affect her much more negatively and trips had got ‘darker’. During her finals she struggled to sleep and didn’t want to eat. Her friends tried to get her out of her room and left food by the door for her as she became very scared of going outside. She had stopped washing and didn’t always brush her teeth. She found that medication didn’t make any difference and that when she did take prescribed drugs they made her feel a lot worse. She felt unable to sit exams, and turned up only to two, in which she was unable to write. During this time she was in touch with her brother but not with her parents, and she didn’t want either of them to know what was happening. Eventually her parents saw her and wanted her to come home. She doesn’t know how she got on the train. She wanted a way out such as ‘drowning’ but ‘was never brave enough to carry any of those things through’. Things that she hadn’t thought about for a while came to the surface. She was put on various different anti-depressants by her GP, and then the depression started to turn psychotic. She started digging holes in her skin, tearing pieces of her hair out, and hitting herself. She didn’t know much about the passing of day and night. She started to feel that her thoughts were affecting other people, and that she was going to cause the death of her brother and her ex. Eventually she thought she was a ‘Satanic creature’ who was going to bring about the destruction of the earth. She was taken to a healer who was ‘quite disgusted’ by her and the things she was talking about. She stopped drinking and found herself in hospital. She thought she was being taken to jail and that she would be tortured as punishment. At this point she was running through her head scenarios of her brother jumping off a building, or being pushed off by her parents; she also thought that her punishment for her crimes would be extreme. She started to hallucinate and these hallucinations were at least as ‘real’ as any of the trips she had experienced. They tried to give her an ECG but she refused at the last moment as she thought she would be electrocuted. Eventually the drugs started to work and she persuaded herself that none of the horrible things that had been going to happen had happened, so she must have imagined it. After being an inpatient she had therapy that was ‘helpful’ for a while, but went back into drug-taking as she started to feel alright again. Nada went to India to do some voluntary work and fell pregnant, had an abortion. She was having unprotected sex and she ‘craved intimacy’. During this time a close friendship collapsed as she had slept with the friend’s partner, and this caused a great deal of distress. She fell pregnant from this second relationship and had another abortion, and her partner at the time ‘stood by her’. She returned to complete her degree and struggled, but with support from university and friends managed to get through. She stayed on for just over a year after finishing, during which time she worked, got into drumming, was still ‘partying’ quite heavily and had a nice time. She then fell ill again and had a couple of periods of insomnia and started to feel she was being watched. She began to think that people in the newspaper doing the Michael Jackson thriller dance seemed terrifyingly real and started to panic about the people closest to her. Her father came to collect her much more quickly this time as friends were able to recognise symptoms and tell her family. Strange events started occurring, such as seeing people she used to work with. She stayed at her mum’s house where things went ‘completely crazy’, and she had lots of hallucinations. She heard voices from ‘up above’ distinctly outside of her head. She felt she was lying on bodies, and a ‘dismembered arm’ was being ‘rubbed over her’; also, that a dismembered leg got thrown up from underneath her. After refusing initially to take medication as she didn’t want to drink or eat again she began taking medication supervised by her family. She spent three months in hospital.

 

Now Nada is living in emergency housing, doing voluntary work and looking into having counselling to look at the ‘root […] elements’ of her experiences. She feels that, apart from being diagnosed with depression with psychotic symptoms, there is ‘something else going on there’ and that it is ‘hard to put into words’. She feels that she has had access to ‘other dimensions’ and access to a ‘sort of spirit world’. Something in her still ‘feels quite unsettled’. Now she still enjoys music, going out dancing and being with friends.  

Nada was taken to another hospital and then saw people who looked very real trying to attack her through the ceiling.

And then I guess the delusions still carrying on so the first day that I get put into a room, in there, this is when I actually start kind of hallucinating a bit as well I suppose, and I haven’t slept for I don’t know how long by this point as well really and I see like people kind of bashing those sort of gratings on the ceiling and I can see loads of people like trying to bash their way through like with whatever they were armed with. Trying to get in to attack me and they looked pretty real but it is an hallucination because there

 

can’t be that many people fitting into the small kind of grating do you know what I mean and I know I have tripped a lot and stuff but this is none drug related you know what I mean and as, you know, it’s almost more, it was almost more real than a lot of the tripping experiences I had.

 

I was going to say how did it compare?

 

I’d say even more vivid in a way but there was still some detachment there, you know, in the fact that just sort of perspective wise it can’t quite fit, you know, there can’t actually be people in that space but it looks like there are loads, you know what, I don’t know if you have, well from my experience of tripping before, I have often seen ghouls and kind of like you know what I mean like sort of beings and stuff that you know, so it was almost that kind of thing I suppose but they seemed more human than, than other [laughter] if that makes sense.  

Nada 'lost control' and she didn't know what to do about finishing university.

January, early February, whatever, of my final year [laughter] you know, and I guess part of this was also an excuse to not be able deal with my finals because I had no idea how I was going to, what I was going to do after, no way could I have returned to any, you know, to, you know the thing that terrified me the most was in a way finishing uni and what the hell was I going to do then.

You know, so I almost created this complete insane kind of like, you know drama again in a way to kind of like avoid sort of dealing with yes reality or whatever. but I remember having a trip with this person I was with and it was quite a full on trip as well and after that I never properly managed to leave that, that trip kind of thing, I’d done so much as well by this point as well that trips had started to affect me quite negatively as well even though I didn’t maybe stop doing them.

They weren’t always this incredible wow experience that I’d had off them of like experiencing things like, you know what I mean - it was, you know, they’d become quite dark too, because you can’t help but introspect and yes I don’t know. I guess went through sort of the emotions of it all at the time or something but I kind of wanted to shut down, if that makes sense?

Nada has always been 'emotional' and sensitive. She can remember her parents fighting a lot and spent much time away from home.

Well I’d say I’ve always be like very emotional like for as long as I can remember and actually like I have sort of memories of feeling, you know, pretty down sort of down from like a really really young age as well and I guess it’s more from being like a really sensitive person and stuff and like I don’t know my family, my family environment, my home environment never really felt very sort of safe or secure really and I don’t know, gosh it’s really difficult thinking that far back but...

 

Why didn’t your family environment feel safe or secure?

 

Well... it was just I don’t know my parents like, you know, were sort of were not in a very happy relationship, you know, and... there was kind of always sort of fights and arguments and stuff like that and like to be fair I tried to sort of spend as much time away from home as possible so I remember kind of like, you know, always kind of doing things like, you know, outside activities like being away but it took up quite a lot of energy as well. But I, you know, yes like I spent a lot of time outside of the sort of house like I didn’t, I didn’t ever really look forward to coming back there and stuff.

 

I blotted quite a lot, it’s almost like memory wise, I blocked quite a lot of it out and then it would sort of like come back sometimes but like yes like my parents were quite sort of, you know, like violent towards each other but it was more also just kind of, I mean they would, they’d sort of fight over sort of everything pretty much and like and that would be inside and outside the home as well so it would be quite public sometimes as well.  

Nada hadn't learnt how to cope with her thoughts without smoking cannabis.

Obviously I did smoke in a way to kind of control, you know, you know in a way it was a medicating thing, you know, obviously when you stop that you stop doing that, you know that overactive thoughts and stuff but they all come flooding back don’t they? And everyone has that in different ways of like coping like whether it be exercise or whatever it is you know. But I hadn’t really learnt a way of coping with all those thoughts because I’d been smoking for the last eight years or whatever ten years maybe even.

Nada wasn't able to take very much in at school because she was worried about what was happening at home.

I don’t think things really improved at school or anything ,probably, you know, in a sense got worse and stuff but I made it through like somehow and I was a nightmare for my teachers I think I guess the pattern again, had already set in by that point and when I was sort of younger I was really quite hard working and stuff but by about 13/14 that just completely got shattered, you know, I just lost interest in sort of doing these things for myself or kind of motivation just went and I didn’t see the point and I was always so distracted and so absorbed and so worried and conscious about what was going to happen later or what was happening, that I wasn’t able to concentrate really at school or take very much in either, you know, you know, I don’t know my head was always elsewhere kind of thing, you know. But I guess when it came down to it I had a reasonably good memory so I would just kind of learn like just cram memorising stuff I suppose cram that in and stuff and somehow kind of like short term memory like you know, like I could sort of do it the night beforehand I would be able to remember it for the next day maybe but then it would go kind of thing and I’d off load it but it was just enough to have for me to kind of get by I suppose . I think that deteriorated with my excessive smoking and stuff but yes well right so 

Seeing her parents made Nada feel worse; when she tried to tell them this, her dad accepted it but her mum felt angry and rejected.

I still wasn’t handling my parents coming to see me at all, because it just made me feel worse, just made me feel like I was just how much I was distressing them you know in a way and I still didn’t know how to deal with them at all. So I still, I put up a bit of a wall, I tried to tell them like... I kind of felt that every time I’d start to feel a bit better they’d come and it would just set me straight back, you know, so any kind of progress I was making would just be completely like, just vanish. and so I tried to write to them to sort of say, you know I need to get better; I can’t do this with having contact with you I’ve got to do this on my own. My dad kind of took that, kind of, my mum totally didn’t was just angry you know, I don’t know felt rejected again.